Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  I ask about the cancer. “When he came back from surgery in Memphis, he didn’t talk about it much.” She makes a circle with her thumb and index finger. “He was that big around.” He took to walking with a cane. He couldn’t eat right. He tried to keep on working. He stared out windows a lot. Finally, he called his baby sister: “Pat, come get me.” Just before she drove him home to die, one of the other female workers at the restaurant tried to hug him. He shrank from the pain of the embrace, putting his hands up. “Please,” he begged. Pat James carried him to Oxford in the car and he went into the hospital that night and two weeks later he was dead.

  Susan Plunk is crying, looking out the window toward the parking lot. “I went over to the hospital in Oxford to see him. I don’t even know if he knew me. He had so much painkiller in him.” The picture is open before us. We’re in the same booth he always sat in when he was taking a break, or before the restaurant opened for the day.

  “Did he seem to regret things?”

  She knows where this is going. “You mean like racism things?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, it would be hard to know.”

  Later, at Susan’s suggestion, I look up one of his old cop buddies. Like so many others, he holds the magazine out in front of him. “Well, bless his heart,” says this cop, who is still a cop. Later, too, some others who used to work at Long John’s recall him fondly. Audine Stutts Nix dated him for a while. “He proposed to me, matter of fact,” she says. “We went a year. I think he had his cancer long before they diagnosed it. He’d wake up in the middle of the night and vomit.” And Tanya Lambert, who, like Susan Plunk, was a teenager when she first worked for Jim Garrison, in answer to a question of why he kept on working until the end, says: “I’m pretty sure it’s because he just didn’t want to be alone. He knew he was going to die, and he just didn’t want to be by himself.”

  A few months later, I visited Pat James again and also an older sister, Mary Katharine Hemphill. If anything, the family memories were dearer, more entrenched. The talking was pleasant. The sisters referred to each other as “the doctor” and “the banker.” Pat James, an R.N., has always ministered to the sick of the family, while her big sister, Mary Katharine, so natural with figures and ledger books, and perhaps a little more suspicious of strangers who are writers, has always kept an eye on the business side of Garrison matters. On the phone, Pat said she had asked her husband, Harold James, if he’d sit and talk to me this time. “I told him there was this man with a magazine and he’d like to talk to you about the riots. But my husband said to tell you, ‘No, that’s past. That’s dead.’ ”

  I’ve been served a Coke again, with a napkin around the base of the sweating glass. “We lived on a farm for a while when Jim was young,” Mary Katharine is saying. “He was the cream and the love of the neighborhood. All these people would come to the farm and Jim would just shine for them.” Pat: “I remember an old maid schoolteacher. Edna Snipes. When Jim worked in our bait shop, before he got the job at Long John’s, he used to sit and talk to her. He never knew a stranger, Jim didn’t. He loved the elderly.” She hesitates. “You know, he so wanted his own children. He would have been a wonderful father.”

  Several days before he died, barely able to speak but sometimes calling out a name when a family member came into the room, Jim passed to Mary Katharine a little ledger book he’d long been keeping. In neat entries, he’d recorded the various small loans he’d made to friends and employees. “You go collect this,” he whispered to his sister. Well, she tried to get some, but then forgot about it.

  A twelve-year-old grandson has come into the living room as these stories are being told. The boy suspends himself upside down on a Barcalounger. “Look here, Wesley, your relative,” Pat says. The kid rights himself, springs to the floor, comes over to take a look at the magazine. He grunts and goes back to standing on his head.

  Since the family has lived in town for decades, I ask if they knew Faulkner. “We knew him,” says Pat. “We knew this man. Well, we didn’t really know him. We’d see him downtown, smoking his pipe, looking at people. He’d have his foot corkscrewed up behind him against the wall of Blaylock’s Drug Store. We thought he was odd.”

  As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s tragic-cum-hilarious story of the Bundren family’s odyssey across Mississippi to bury wife and mother Annie Bundren. Each member of the family tells the story, including Annie’s son Darl, a kind of lost boy, who says: “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”

  In Kosciusko, James Meredith’s hometown, up near the middle of the state, where I was just passing through, the young and attractive black woman with TRAINER on her tag softly put the change in my hand, not in the least self-conscious about her skin touching mine. A few feet away, in the booths, six elderly black men were talking. One spoke loudly about how he’d not been a good father, and so why should he think his sons would have turned out any differently as parents. They slurped their coffee and sat with their bodies slack. Another man said he could remember having to stare at the floor and not look up the whole time some sonofabitch white man—any white man—demanded it, not necessarily by anything the bastard said, just by his presence. “I’ve lived through all that,” he said. “Never forget it.” Opposite him, a third man in this group said, “You’re still afraid of white men, ain’t you?” There was a strained silence. The man who’d told about having to stare at floors ate his Egg McMuffin. But to think: a half dozen old black men, up from apartheid, talking of these matters, loudly as they pleased, in the clean and well-lit Friday morning plastic cheeriness of a McDonald’s in James Meredith’s hometown. Around them at other booths and tables were another twenty or so diners—blacks and whites and some Pakistanis and I think some Choctaw Indians. Nobody paid any particular mind to anybody else. The entire room was eating and chatting and commingling with its own dreams and anxieties and separate resentments. It was the illusion of racial heterogeneity, and the more I traveled in the lush, blistered paradise and place of sorrows called Mississippi, the more I deeply understood the fact.

  Grimsley

  Law enforcement was in the hands of bigots, and bigotry was respectable.

  —C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

  His neck seems violently red against the tight white collar.

  —James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

  He loved his lid. “Boys, I’m getting me a Stetson hat and you all are going to wear one, too,” he told his dozen deputies on the first or second day he came into office. He’s got it steamed and blocked and dented just so. The leather band on the inside must be a greasy and sweet-smelling black: congealed sweat and Vitalis gone so rancid it’s turned the corner and become strangely fine. Did he go all the way to New Orleans, to a famous hatter on St. Charles Avenue, just to buy his beaver chapeau? Somebody who knew him pretty well back then remembered that. In any case, there must have been some large vanity in this hefty man, even though others have wondered in retrospect whether the gaudy strut and effusive greeting—“Hello, son!” he’d cry at you from across a Pascagoula street, if you were white—were just a reaction to how ugly he felt inside. So maybe the “colorfulness” people speak of was cloaking a fearsome lack of self-worth. His face was deeply pocked. His bulbous nose was deeply veined. The head law enforcer went around his county with breath generally stinking from liquor.

  His name was James Ira Grimsley. He’s second on the left. He’s fifty. Let him go on guffawing a little bit more in this silvered September light, his hands stuck in his trouser pockets, his specs sliding downward. He’ll be on earth for another twenty-five years, until his diseased liver and asbestosis carry him off. He may have gotten the first germs of it inside him decades ago, when he’d worked in the local shipyards. He’s going to die alone, on a Monday, October 19, 1987, in a boxy little pine-board house at 2506 Grimsley Drive in the sweltering town at the bottom of the state, on the Gulf Coast, where he was born and reare
d and is head lawman now. His wife will have gone before. There will be no children. Apparently, there will be no money. Poise him in your imagination, undisturbed, even as he’s held on this sheet of developing paper. “All photographs are abandonings,” a cultural critic at the Washington Post, Henry Allen, once wrote. “Once there was a moment, the click of a shutter, and now it’s gone, a framed ghost, abandoned by time and failing memory. This is the sentiment at the heart of photography’s mechanical mystery.” This framed, inebriated ghost isn’t going to be abandoned. You’ll hear about his life, and of the way his hypocritical and equally bigoted fellow Pascagoulians began to forsake him, after they’d allowed him to become their drunken hero, within several months of when this photograph was made. They forsook him not because they were morally ashamed, of either his or their own behavior, but because their livelihoods and financial well-being seemed suddenly in the balance: They’d grown terrified that the federal government, disgusted with Mississippi and in particular with some of their own actions, might cancel lucrative contracts at the big Pascagoula shipyard, on which their economy so depended. But first, a few pages in a broader vein about high sheriffs and Mississippi in the torn years of civil rights.

  The word “sheriff” is said to derive from thirteenth-century England, when kings began the practice of appointing officers of the court known as the Shire Reeves, or Reeves of the Shire. They were personal representatives of the king, empowered to collect his revenue and to preserve his peace. The office of sheriff, thought to be the oldest law enforcement office within the common-law system, may go back—if not by name, then in function—as far as the ninth century. So in Great Britain a sheriff was an important figure even before the Magna Carta. Sometimes he entered the realm of legend—the sheriff of Nottingham, for instance, who pursued Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest in the twelfth century. In Mississippi, not any longer, but for a longer while than for most other states of the union—really, right into modern times—“sheriff” always stood for two things: the district’s tax collector and its top cop, who possessed nearly unassailable authority. And that is how a candidate campaigned for the countywide job. If he got elected, he could expect to get his cut of every tax dime taken in. But the ways in which he became rich—not that all Mississippi sheriffs automatically did—didn’t necessarily have to do with those fractions, which were normally about 5 percent. A corrupt sheriff in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s made most of his illicit loot from payoffs for allowing whiskey joints to remain open. He made it from skims on the prostitution and gambling he’d permit to go on within his borders. Depending on the level of his corruption and avarice, depending on the makeup of the county itself, he could get quite wealthy, or only happily fixed. There’s an old saying in Mississippi: All you have to do is “get that thing once,” the “thing” being the office of sheriff. That’s not a truism anymore, or so almost everybody insists, including current holders of the office. Nowadays, there are checks and balances on the office—some.

  There were dry counties and wet counties back then—but liquor was illegal in every county, and had been since 1908—except that the state legislature had passed something called “the black market tax,” meaning that there was legal taxation on a product that didn’t lawfully exist. In certain towns and counties, the prohibition law was completely ignored, and joints and package stores operated openly; if not with impunity, at least with no fear of being shut down, so long as they kept to their payoff schedules. The sheriff had to get his monthly bribe, but others did, too. The sheriff, after all, was keeping the place clean: no sales to minors. If the bar owners and package-store proprietors operated within a town’s limits, they could expect to get arrested by the constabulary once a month—say, on a Monday morning—and then they’d more or less happily troop down to City Hall to pay their $100 fine, allowing them to stay open for the next thirty days. (The money theoretically went into the city kitty.)

  In terms of what were called lawful earnings, the head lawman worked on a complicated fee and commission system. He got a percentage from selling license tags, for serving a summons or a subpoena, from taking bail bonds, for feeding prisoners, for making arrests. He paid his deputies out of these fees and commissions. His deputies, picked by him, were on a salary set by him. The deputies, like constables (these were low-level law enforcement officials, managing a “beat” within the county), made mileage money whenever a prisoner was brought to a justice of the peace. The constable, unlike the deputy, also got paid a percentage of every fine, along with the JP and others, so on this level of law enforcement there was a financial incentive to write tickets and to make arrests on trumped-up charges. Civil rights workers were the fattest targets in the sixties, it doesn’t need explaining. You can go through old newspapers and find in the fine print, under court proceedings, entries like this one: “Milton Hancock fined $175 by Judge Orman Kimbrough. $50 for reckless driving, $25 for improper equipment on automobile, $10 for resisting arrest. Car had no muffler, no right headlight, and ‘did not look in good operating order.’ ”

  Theoretically, a sheriff could be removed from office—but it was mostly a theory. There was some sort of archaic provision on the books that the county coroner could arrest the sheriff in an emergency. The sheriff’s police power, extending to the next county line, was absolute—which isn’t to say that weak men didn’t sometimes get into office and become victims of their own power. Or maybe victims of the racist mayor (who perhaps kept his white sheet folded in the top drawer of the dresser in his bedroom). Or maybe victims of the leaders of the local Ku Klux Klan (who, in some cases, had their offices downtown, with Klan insignia on the door). Or maybe victims of the heads of that county’s chapter of the White Citizens’ Council (who, in a way, were the most pernicious Mississippians of all, since they attempted to conduct their bigotry with a kind of Rotarian respectability).

  Sheriffs in Mississippi during the years of civil rights were of a type, but they also ran the gamut of human nature. If virtually none could be said to be anywhere near benevolent in his treatment of blacks, it seems equally true that only the vilest hated with a pure white unrelenting hatred. More than a few had to have been sadists—there is plenty of testimony around to make you believe that. It was as if the legacy of slavery came with their office, and so they lived up to it. That is a kind of epitaph for white Mississippi itself. And yet nothing is monolithic. As a noted book critic, Benjamin Schwarz, has written of Southern law enforcers in general (in a 1998 review of an important work of scholarship titled Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, by Leon F. Litwack): “Because by current standards nearly all white Southerners were racist, it is easy to assume that there is no point in distinguishing among their ‘racist’ attitudes. But it is doubtful whether a black sharecropper visiting a strange town in rural Arkansas, for instance, wouldn’t care whether its sheriff was a segregationist who opposed violence and favored a degree of protection to blacks (however inadequate to modern eyes) or whether he was a virulent racist who would deny blacks the most basic rights and indeed encourage threats to their lives and property. Although perhaps both figures are reprehensible, both sorts of white men lived throughout the South and the difference between them could, for a black man, mean life or death.”

  In some counties of Mississippi, as the movement began, blacks outnumbered whites four to one. In 1962, there were still whole counties where not a single black was registered to vote. In his landmark work The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward, perhaps the greatest of all Southern historians, a deep if ambivalent lover of the South, wrote: “The state with the largest Negro minority and the last state to have a black majority of population, Mississippi was also the poorest state in the Union, and the most profoundly isolated from national life and opinion. Professor James W. Silver described it as ‘a closed society,’ which ‘comes as near to approximating a police state as anything we have yet seen in America.’ Its Negroes lived in constant fear and its whites u
nder rigid conformity to dogmas of white supremacy as interpreted by a state-subsidized Citizens’ Council.”

  James Silver was a white history professor at Ole Miss during the Meredith crisis, and afterward he wrote a book entitled Mississippi: The Closed Society. It is probably the most famous condemnation of the state ever written. “In such a society,” Silver said, “a never-ceasing propagation of the ‘true faith’ must go on relentlessly, with a constantly reiterated demand for loyalty to the united front, requiring that non-conformists and dissenters from the code be silenced, or, in a crisis, driven from the community.” Silver himself left the state in the middle sixties, driven out by many forces. He went to Notre Dame University and then afterward the non-Mississippi native retired to Florida, where he died. As much as there is to be admired in his courageous book, it seems a little exaggerated. The book would have you think that the collective pressures were so unspeakable that no ordinary white Mississippian in any community or town ever spoke out. But, in truth, in almost every community and town back then, there were ordinary heroic white people doing ordinary jobs who tried to bear some kind of witness—quiet or otherwise—against what was going on, and who didn’t leave, and who weren’t murdered, and who, in some cases, are living today in the same houses on the same streets. These white Mississippians, local people, if piteously few in number, were present, in the fifties and sixties, during the wall of water, along with the far more numerous and even more heroic black Mississippians, local people, who were present, willing to give away everything, including their lives, toward the promise of eventual freedom.

  In 1963, which is when portions of Silver’s book were first published, which is also the year thirty-seven-year-old Medgar Evers was slain in his driveway in Jackson, Roy Wilkins, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said: “There is no state with a record that approaches that of Mississippi in inhumanity, murder, brutality, and racial hatred. It is absolutely at the bottom of the list.” That same year, the Judiciary Committee of the Eighty-eighth Congress held civil rights hearings in Washington. The committee produced a “Chronology of Violence and Intimidation in Mississippi Since 1961,” gathered mainly from civil rights organizations. There was this entry, for instance, page 1073, in the many pages of dense, shrunken type: